The tremendous growth of wireless telecommunication services has led to an increasingly competitive environment that has prompted operators to intensify the search for areas in which to cut costs. One area that may be suitable for cost reduction is in the conventional procedure for billing subscribers for wireless telecommunication services. In the typical conventional billing method, network providers generally must collect billing information containing the detailed calling data of subscribers to generate a bill which is then printed on paper, packaged and sorted in order to be sent to the subscriber through the postal system. For a network provider that must provide billing to hundreds of thousands of subscribers or more on a periodic basis, the billing process may represent a significant portion of its operating expenses.
Billing by conventional means have other drawbacks. For example, it relies on a third party for delivery thus the sender is generally not absolutely certain that the subscriber has received his/her bill. Furthermore, a delay of several days is typically incurred when using the postal system thus subscribers are not able to access to their bill unit it has arrived by mail. This can be inconvenient when subscribers are away for extended periods of time, for example, and therefore they typically do not have access to their bills until they return. Another consideration with the paper billing format is that it is cumbersome and requires subscribers manually sort through their bills not to mention the high cost of using enormous amounts of paper for printing bills on a regular basis.
In view of the foregoing, it is an objective of the present invention to provide a method and system for delivering bills in a cost effective and timely manner without having to rely on a third party for delivery.